Farewell! For in that word—that fatal word—howe’er We promise—hope—believe—there breathes despair.

These lines are spoken in Byron’s narrative poem *The Corsair* (1814), during a scene of parting in which the speaker dwells on the emotional finality carried by the word “farewell.” Written at the height of Byron’s early fame, *The Corsair* belongs to the sequence of “Oriental tales” that made him a literary celebrity and that repeatedly stage intense, doomed attachments under the shadow of exile, secrecy, and violence. The passage reflects Byron’s characteristic preoccupation with leave-taking as a moment where language itself becomes tragic: even when parting is softened by vows and hopes, the utterance “farewell” already contains the seed of loss.

Byron treats “farewell” as more than a polite formula: it is a “fatal word” whose sound carries an inevitability that overwhelms whatever consolations accompany it. The dashes enact hesitation and emotional fracture, as if the speaker tries to interrupt the word’s meaning with promises, hopes, and beliefs—only to concede that despair “breathes” within it. The line suggests a bleak insight into human attachment: language can announce separation in a way that makes the separation real, and optimism becomes a fragile overlay on an underlying recognition of impermanence. The passage exemplifies Byron’s Romantic fatalism and his fascination with passion shadowed by loss.